PS3 Hard Drive upgrade went wrong? Plz help

[sup3r1or]

Good evening,

I had a fat PS3 with 250GB hard drive for a while now, so yesterday I purchased PS3 SLIM 160GB. Today I decided to swap hard drives, took 160 from slim to fat one, worked like a charm straight away. However when I took 250GB with all my data to SLIM, I get greeted with a message Unable to load System or firmware... please press PS button to restart system, if it doesnt work you will have to reformat your partition (which I dont want to do ). The thing is I dont even get to XMB.

Why is this happening? Why i didnt have any problems from with 160GB from SLIM TO FAT? Both hard drives are the same brand, Hitachi.

Does anyone know how to solve this problem? Should I take HDD out and put it back in again in case it not fit properly or something? I thought XMB is stored on internal flash memory.

Thank you

[AaronSOLDIER]

You need to reformat it to your slim because its currently formatted to your phat. You can't take it out of one and put it in another.

Put it back in your fat, backup to an external device, put it in your slim and format then get all your backed up data back on it.

[coolguy]

IF he puts back the drive back in his phat he will have to reformat it.

[emmerich]

I hope you backed up your HD before taking it out your older PS3 because if you didn't there's no way to recover it and you're supposed to be formatting it.

[sup3r1or]

So if I put it to my phat one back will I be able to access my data to back it up or not?

[keefy]

So if I put it to my phat one back will I be able to access my data to back it up or not?

Try it and find out.

[SprSynJn]

I'm glad I found this thread as I also plan to switch my 320GB drive that I purchased into a new PS3 once I buy it. I thought I could access any old data, but it appears I cannot. Unfortunate it is.

[Ghost-Rhayne]

One thing you guys also need to note is that it may pay to download the latest firmware for the PS3 from the official site and put it on the HDD that you use to back up your original HDs. I had this issue when I did mine. I think you have to put the FW in a certain folder too but I forget if that's right or not, but there is plenty of info on the net about it.

[TOM2x]

Anytime you swap HDD in or out, you will have to Re-format anyway, so you MUST back-up before you remove to swap. The only way around it is if you have 2 PS3s you can perform a Data transfer from one to the other using the Utility and an ethernet cable. This is the ONLY way i know how to do this without losing anything or backing up saves to another storage device. Good luck!

[SprSynJn]

Tom, thank you for the advice. My old PS3 kicked the bucket about five months ago, so I'm unable to transfer anything I think. Luckily I copied my save files to an SD card at regular intervals, but that was it. Regardless, I am grateful Sony uses cloud storage on the PSN.

[TOM2x]

Tom, thank you for the advice. My old PS3 kicked the bucket about five months ago, so I'm unable to transfer anything I think. Luckily I copied my save files to an SD card at regular intervals, but that was it. Regardless, I am grateful Sony uses cloud storage on the PSN.

No problem! If your old PS3 just stopped reading discs, you can still perform data transfer. If it Yellow lighted, then no. Cloud storage helps a lot too. But, one thing I noticed was that unless you used the Data transfer utility, many games that have locked saves won't transfer, like Rock band songs. Which I thought was kinda lame since I have about 500 songs. I bought a 500 Gig HD just to back up my stuff and when I used it it finished in like 3 minutes. I was thinking, wow that was quick! Then I found out why, because most of my games had locked saves and none of it backed up. Then, did some reading up and found that the Transfer utility would do all of it, which it does. I was just lucky that it was only the lens that died, the HD was still fine.
But hopefully it helped you out a bit! Take care.

[sup3r1or]

Alright here is the latest update: One new issue!
I managed to put HDD back into phat and make a backup of all my content (48GB). Swapped hardrives and restored, BUT none of the content purchased online was restored. I had 3 accounts but was unable to remember logins of US one to get dead nation back.

Anyway new issue here, I fired up little big planet 2 and, it doesnt load my save file! WTF? What is the issue here, I mean did i create new user account or something? I still logged in into PSN network with my old details same ones I used on my other user account on a ps3. Why I created new one? cuz it restored it as USER 1, which I didnt like and since there is no option to rename i deleted it and made a new one. I still do see my save games user PS3 Save data

[TOM2x]

Alright here is the latest update: One new issue!
I managed to put HDD back into phat and make a backup of all my content (48GB). Swapped hardrives and restored, BUT none of the content purchased online was restored. I had 3 accounts but was unable to remember logins of US one to get dead nation back.

Anyway new issue here, I fired up little big planet 2 and, it doesnt load my save file! WTF? What is the issue here, I mean did i create new user account or something? I still logged in into PSN network with my old details same ones I used on my other user account on a ps3. Why I created new one? cuz it restored it as USER 1, which I didnt like and since there is no option to rename i deleted it and made a new one. I still do see my save games user PS3 Save data

OK, I think you may need to go back in and under user account settings De-activate Video and then Game and re-activate them. And then I believe this will recognize your accounts. I know the stuff you purchased can all be re-downloaded just by going into yout account and seeing the list of Downloaded purchases, click on them as if your going to re-download it and then you should see something to the effect of (Activating....) Then stop the download and it should recognize the items on your XMB that it didn't previously. Not entirely sure, but that is what it sounds like to me. message back and let me know it it worked. Good luck!

[TGO]

Remember not all saves will be copied over to your slim, eventhou you backed them up, some of your gamesaves will only copy from a backup to the original playstation you backed them up on, the only way round it would be cloud saves on your PSN, if you have PS+

[AaronSOLDIER]

LittleBigPlanet/2 saves are stored in Game Data but to back them up you need to do it ingame or something like that.

[coolguy]

I'm glad I found this thread as I also plan to switch my 320GB drive that I purchased into a new PS3 once I buy it. I thought I could access any old data, but it appears I cannot. Unfortunate it is.

320 gigs is plenty i have a 250 gig drive and still have 190 gigs free

[SprSynJn]

No problem! If your old PS3 just stopped reading discs, you can still perform data transfer. If it Yellow lighted, then no. Cloud storage helps a lot too. But, one thing I noticed was that unless you used the Data transfer utility, many games that have locked saves won't transfer, like Rock band songs. Which I thought was kinda lame since I have about 500 songs. I bought a 500 Gig HD just to back up my stuff and when I used it it finished in like 3 minutes. I was thinking, wow that was quick! Then I found out why, because most of my games had locked saves and none of it backed up. Then, did some reading up and found that the Transfer utility would do all of it, which it does. I was just lucky that it was only the lens that died, the HD was still fine.
But hopefully it helped you out a bit! Take care.

It unfortunately "yellow lighted", as you called it. So I am pretty sure there is no way to get all that information back. Thank you for the suggestion though. I will make sure to look into that Data Transfer utility for my new system.

320 gigs is plenty i have a 250 gig drive and still have 190 gigs free

If I were to just use the space for games and game saves, then yes it would be more than adequate. However, here I use it with a digital recording peripheral to record my shows off the TV. So, it would actually be nice to have more than 320GBs honestly.

[sup3r1or]

Alright I managed to get pass that stupid error, I had to delete my user and create a new one and it worked. As for Little big planet 2 saves, yes I lost them I guess. Not a big deal

Btw I wanted to see if I can recover the password of my US account (that I used to check out store and actually have a few free games on it). I dont seems to remember any details except for email, not even date of bith cuz it was just a random choice. Tried doing it from PSN website but as soon as I click forgot password it says its under maintenance, and I'm sure its been like this for over a month.

[rene2kx]

You need to reformat it to your slim because its currently formatted to your phat. You can't take it out of one and put it in another.

Put it back in your fat, backup to an external device, put it in your slim and format then get all your backed up data back on it

^That's your answer OP. just get an external usb hard drive , even a 500 gb one is not that expensive. Back up first from the fat model then restore data in the slim ,using the external usb drive.

[jlippone]

If you have 2 'working' ps3 systems easiest way to transfer data between them is using transfer utility and use network cable from one ps3 to an other.
Simply hook them both to same tv and cable between the machines.

Turn them on and select transfer utility from both and select source and destination machines, it will copy all information from machine onto the other. (so if you want fast copy delete all un-necessary videos from source HDD before you do this.)

[TOM2x]

Alright I managed to get pass that stupid error, I had to delete my user and create a new one and it worked. As for Little big planet 2 saves, yes I lost them I guess. Not a big deal

Btw I wanted to see if I can recover the password of my US account (that I used to check out store and actually have a few free games on it). I dont seems to remember any details except for email, not even date of bith cuz it was just a random choice. Tried doing it from PSN website but as soon as I click forgot password it says its under maintenance, and I'm sure its been like this for over a month.

Try Accessing it from Qriocity, it worked for me a while back, while all the network problems were happening. It did work like a charm!